Sometimes I am accused of hammering this issue into
the ground. That’s fine with me. It comes up a lot among the different factions of the libertarian movement and, to
my mind, has become a good measure of where people stand on individual rights versus collective rights. There are a bunch
of different views on why there might be a case for collective rights, and just as many excuses.

Socialism

To me,
there is no difference between collective rights and socialism and I think I should state that from the beginning. Socialism
is a socio-economic belief that property and the control of wealth are subject to the control of the community as a whole,
working towards some “greater good”. As I have stated previously, there is no greater good than personal freedom,
so for this reason I am totally opposed to the concept of socialism. That doesn’t mean that I don’t think people
have the right, need or desire to work together for a common goal and they should always be free to voluntarily associate
to do that. And there is the rub.

If you
are not given the choice to participate in something voluntarily, what is the difference between that and being a “subject”
of who ever? In this country that “who ever” is the majority sometimes, the government other times, working on
behalf of the perceived wants of the people. In this case, the perceived want is to keep “illegal” aliens out
of the country. There are a couple of understandable (although incorrect) beliefs behind this for the socialist minded. First
is a protection of the environment. I know that may sound strange on its face, but the belief is that more people equal more
of a negative impact on the environment. Next is protection of public goods, such as welfare programs, “public”
roads, “public” education, etc. As I pointed out in an article entitled, “Quit Saying Public Please”,
“public” is actually a euphemism for government owned. Just because they take our money to pay for those things
doesn’t make us co-owners of them. And these “public” goods are usually administered on the state, not federal
level. Every immigrant, whether they are legal or “illegal”, pay as much into the system for these local goods
as anyone else, especially when we break down the amount paid based on what economic class the people are paying into it from.
The money that is pumped into these programs from the federal government all comes from federal taxation that comes from the
people of the states anyway. The third and probably most vocal opposition to immigrants is their entry into the labor pool.
Socialists have a need and desire to protect “their” labor pool from outside competing labor. For a socialist
system to operate (for however temporarily they are able to keep it a float) they must have control over the flow of people
into and OUT OF the system.

Socialists
are not the only ones opposed to immigration, even though the other groups, if they were capable of being honest about it,
should be able to trace their reasons back to this socialist standpoint.

Nationalism

Nationalists
are also opposed to immigration on the grounds that it “dilutes” the culture of the country they are entering.
This is the group that will be most vocal about their opposition not being “racist”, even though their argument
is nothing but racist. Their arguments all sound something like this…

“These
people bring their culture with them and don’t integrate into the culture of the US. They keep their language. They
bring their politics with them. They tend to keep to themselves and not become a part of the larger community. They are not
educated and they take all the entry level jobs. They don’t care about their communities, they leave trash everywhere.
They are more involved in crime than normal citizens (and if you ask for proof of that, they use the old line, “They
are here illegally, that means they are criminals).”

To me,
those are all racist reasons and we should call the people that make them racist. The exact same arguments against the blacks,
Irish, Germans, Italians, and every other group, were used to keep these groups from being accepted into the mainstream society
of the US.

But we
have another one to add to the list since 9-11. “They might be terrorists or sympathetic to terrorist groups.”
Of course, this one falls apart pretty quick when the opponent is honest. Someone can be any race and be sympathetic to terrorists.
They can be from any country. They can come to this country from anywhere or already be in this country. So, why aren’t
we building the wall along the Canadian border? That’s were the hijackers came into the country from. And out of the
19 hijackers, only 3 were here illegally. But the wall isn’t going along the Canadian border. This same argument isn’t
being used against white people. The focus of the attack is on the Hispanic immigrants, not even on the immigrants from the
Middle East, were the supposed breeding ground for “Death To America” comes from. Mexicans on the other hand love
America. They have loved it so much in the past that a third of the country belonged to them.

When these
arguments fail, they retreat to the socialist economic positions that I mentioned earlier.

Outright Racists

Another
group that I am going to mention here is the people who are outright racist. Their arguments usually fall into the above two
categories, but they add their old favorite stand bys. Since they don’t really even have their own ideas maybe I could
gloss over them like so many others do. But they are out there so no use denying it. Anyone that has seen or been to any immigration
rallies (either pro or con) has seen them there, making themselves known and heard on the issue. This group doesn’t
get the media coverage that the others do. They aren’t embraced by the public face of the anti-immigration movement,
but they are there. And for that reason, they are here too.

Believe
it or not, as reprehensible as I find their views most of the time, this is the group that I think is at least honest about
their beliefs. They hate (insert some group here) and don’t want to have anything to do with them. Like I said, at least
they are honest about it, something to be said for that.

The Stupid Sheep

The last
group is the outright stupid. I probably shouldn’t include them in the list either, since every side of every argument
or position has their fair share of these people. They are ill-informed of the positions they take, they have nothing but
regurgitated propaganda to repeat, they spend their time hammering one point whether it is true or not and they don’t
seem to care that they are ignorant. The reason I thought I should include them in this list is because it seems the anti-immigration
crowd has more than its fair share of these people. Lots of times it seems like an argument a lot of them hold onto is that
Mexico is a third world country were disease (at least in their minds) is running rampant and the immigrants need to be screened
for these diseases before they can come to this country.

People
come to this country everyday from all over the world without getting screened for disease. That is just the way it is. But
even if we did screen everyone that came here legally, how is an invisible line in the desert going to stop diseases from
spreading here. It isn’t like you come upon the US-Mexican border and there is force field that keeps diseases from
traveling across the border.

Human Rights, Property Rights and Constitutional Rights

“We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

These are
extremely powerful words and that is probably the reason they open the Declaration of Independence. They put forward that
idea that strikes at the heart of the idea behind natural rights. The Declaration of Independence made clear the idea that
regardless of the government that a person found themselves under, they are entitled to be treated a certain way based, not
on the laws of the nation that claims to be their master, but on something deeper, something rooted in the act of just being
alive. There is nothing in that statement that limits human rights to the rule of any type of law and the document they came
from was in fact a rejection of the rule of law for a higher authority.

Some people
familiar with natural rights might point out that when Locke was talking about natural rights, he included “property”,
instead of the “Pursuit of Happiness”. This is true and deserves to be mentioned. The incorrect assumption that
is often made based on this call to “property” is that it isn’t a call to any type of collective ownership
of property and surely not a call to a governmental monopoly on land that falls inside of its borders. This call to the idea
of collective property goes back to the socialist “collective goods” idea that rejects individual ownership of
property and says that there is a greater good that trumps individual rights and freedoms.

Often I
get to hear that the rights we enjoy in the US are a result of the laws we have here and that anyone that rejects any of those
laws is a criminal that doesn’t deserve to enjoy those rights. Since these people think rights are derived from obeying
the laws of the land, they have never been given a speeding ticket, fined for anything, pulled over or anything like that.
Maybe, trespassing?

Isn’t
that basically what we are talking about here? The law that these evil immigrants have broken can be boiled down to what it
really is, trespassing. Do we deny people their human rights in this country for trespassing? I hope not. And what about my
“constitutional” rights of freedom of association? Does their fear and loathing of immigrants allow me to be denied
of my “constitutional” rights of free association?

This one has been going on for a long time. I started with this one, not because of personal
preferences of any kind, but because this is the basis for so much federal intervention into the everyday lives of the citizens
and it is the one I am most familiar with. The model to enact federal drug laws is still in use today and is the round about
way the federal government actually criminalizes behavior. Until the drug war started, it was a generally held belief that
the states, not the federal government, had the power to criminalize behavior. You would be hard pressed to find criminal
laws from the federal government until after the Harrison Act.

The first state law against marijuana
was in 1913 in California. California had previously passed laws against opium dens in1875, the first anti-drug laws in the
US. The law against opium dens was aimed primarily at Chinese immigrants. When they got around to passing the law against
marijuana, it was primarily aimed at Mexican immigrants. In 1910, Utah outlawed polygamy. Lots of Mormon polygamists moved
to Mexico and when they returned a few years later, they brought marijuana with them. As part of cleaning up vices in the
Mormon Church, the state outlawed marijuana use.

The Harrison Tax Act was the first
federal law to regulate drug use. It was aimed at three drugs; opium, morphine and its derivatives and the coca leaf and its
derivatives. The purpose of the act was made clear from the beginning. First, they wanted to regulate the medical use of these
drugs. What they did is pass a tax and require doctors to get a stamp to prove that they were in the medical practice and
that they paid this tax. Second, they placed a tax of $1000 for any every non-medical exchange of any of these drugs. You
have to remember this is in 1915 and a tax of $1000 was obviously a way to prohibit the transfer of what probably amounted
to less than $1. I remember my grandfather talking about the benches in the front of drug stores we used to see a lot when
I was a kid. He said those benches were for people that had purchased a .5c bag of morphine in the drug store. They would
go and “nod out” on the benches. Of course, failure to pay this “tax” led to breaking a federal crime,
tax evasion.

Between 1915 and 1937, 30 states
outlawed the use of marijuana. The reason for the majority of this is best summed up by the words of one Texas legislator,
“All Mexicans are crazy and this stuff (marijuana) is what makes them crazy.” Some states outlawed marijuana because
they were afraid that heroin addiction would lead to marijuana use. I think that is pretty funny.

In 1937 the congress passed the
Marihuana Tax Act. In the 20’s and 30’s there were two federal law enforcement agencies created. One was the Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). The testimony of congress, before passing this act,
lasted a grand total of two hours. The first to testify was the head of the FBN and his entire testimony was, “Marihuana
is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death.” Another person to testify was a pharmacologist
who said he injected the active ingredient (even though THC wasn’t synthesized until after World War II) into the brain
of 300 dogs and two of them had died.

The last to testify is the most
important though. You have to remember that this was during the time of FDR and his socialization programs. A group that disagreed
often with FDR and his programs was the American Medical Association (AMA). Dr. William Woodward was a doctor and lawyer and
the chief counsel for the AMA. He told congress, “The American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marihuana
is a dangerous drug.” So what did these “progressive” activists in congress reply to him? “Doctor,
if you can’t say something good about what we are trying to do here, why don’t you just go home.” The government
had already made up its mind what it was going to do.

As during alcohol prohibition, drug
prohibition has led to a huge black market for the prohibited drugs. Cost of enforcement, likewise, has also risen. The number
of people in prison hasn’t shrunk due to more enforcement; the market for the drugs hasn’t only increased, but
it has soared. People involved in the drug underground can’t go to the police when a crime is committed against them.
If they are robbed, raped or murdered, they are treated different in the eyes of the law than other citizens.

And the cost of the drug war can’t
be overstated. Even by the federal governments own conservative estimates, the war on drugs cost the taxpayers $37 billion
dollars a year.

The War On…

There have been other things that
we have declared war on. We have declared war on poverty, cancer, terrorism, all with some of the same effects as the war
on drugs. The growth of government programs, out of control spending, private contractor abuses and on and on and on. Regardless
of any good intentions on the part of the people declaring these wars, the end results are fairly the same. We lose something
every time the government takes up a cause. I am sure that depending on ones perspective, these wars could have some merit,
but they all lack the results that show the costs are worthwhile. In the case of the war on terror, the loss of civil liberties
may be the most expensive costs.

Battle lines are drawing up again.
Who knows what the next “war on” is going to be. Probably immigration. If the government holds true to form, the
estimated costs of illegal immigration on the US economy now, will be dwarfed in comparison to how much money and civil liberties
the government can take from us.

YodasWorld.org

Welcome to 2008

By IrishOutlaw

January 7, 2008

Election years are always fun for political junkies. The landscape
changes quick and there is lots and lots of room for speculation on the part of the part-time analysts. But this race is not
generating that kind of deep interest for me really. Yes, it is interesting to speculate what Hillary is going to do slow
the roll of Obama. And I know more than a few people are already working on ways to get Rudy from underneath the crush of,
well, everyone. The powers that be have decided long ago they want a Clinton vs. Guiliani race, but now it is looking like
it might be hard to get there. But I am sure they won’t quit trying, there is a while to go still.

Now is when the claws start to come out. I expect to see some good attack ads pretty soon. And I was all geared up
for certain ones. You know, like, Hillary is a fire breathing, baby killing, neo-con in liberal clothing. Guiliani is a gun
stealing, war mongering, liberal in neo-con clothing. That type of thing. But it doesn’t look like they are going to
really be worth attacking. At least not right away. Bummer.

So now I am going to have to find something else to occupy my time. I was thinking about trying to decide who might
pick who as a running mate. To me that is pretty interesting. My favorite combinations would probably be Obama and Richardson.
No two people on the Republican side interest me. The only political story at all on the Republican side that even comes close
to being interesting is the Ron Paul story. He is the first presidential candidate that I voted for, back in 1988. I was really
rooting for Russell Means to get the Libertarian Parties nomination back than. Means was the reason I became a libertarian
in the first place, but when Paul got the nomination he got me vote too. But I don’t know who, among the Republicans,
Paul could get as a running mate. So, I guess I am going to skip picking his running mate for him. Plus, he has a way to go
to get the Republican nomination.

When the campaigns first started I wanted to see Hillary vs. Paul in the debates, and I would still pay to see that
one. A pro-war Democrat against an anti-war Republican. How great would that be?

So, you might wonder why I haven’t been talking about the Libertarian Parties candidates. Well, its because I
am still not sure who they are. I liked Steve Kubby, but he threw his support to Ron Paul. Than I liked Christine Smith, she
threw her support to Ron Paul also. George Phillies is my next pick. Now this is where an interesting thing comes into play
in my mind. One of the BIG things I have against Ron Paul is his stance on border control. As some of you have probably surmised,
I am an open borders advocate. I believe that “all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights.”
To me, the nationalism that drives most of the anti-immigration movement is just another form of racism. People disagree with
me all the time, since there are diverse ethnicities that support “the wall” and other various immigration control
policies. But to me the US is a “culture” unto itself. Attempts to keep other nationalities out so as to preserve
that culture brings to mind the “Whites Only” water fountains and all that segregation bullshit that so rampant
in the south not that long ago. Anything that is owned by the government, or funded by the government, should be open to any
people. If you don’t like that, get rid of those programs or that government property, but don’t deny that “all
people are created equal” and try to claim that it is only true for people born within the borders of the US. To me
it is pretty hard to reconcile that we should spread our way of life to other countries if we are willing to deny it to people
in ours. Which brings me back to Phillies.

I disagree with his stance on immigration also. But since the hijacking of the Libertarian Party platform, it is inline
with their stance on immigration. I have been, for about a year, telling people in the LP that it is important to support
the party, to vote for the Libertarian candidate. If you are going to do that, I think Phillies is the man, since the other
Libertarians candidates have (at least to this point) thrown their support to Paul. The convention is still a ways away, but
I think Phillies deserves the support of the party for sticking to his guns and running his campaign to get himself elected.

But back to the majors. I really like the idea of Obama and Richardson. There is something about that ticket that just
resonates with me. To elect a black president and a Hispanic vice president, to me, is just an incredibly interesting proposition.
Of course, Obama hasn’t announced a running mate and Richardson is still in the race, but if you read this Obama, take
my advice. What you lack in foreign policy experience, Richardson more than makes up for. You would be hard pressed to find
ANY of the candidates running that have as much foreign policy experience as Richardson.

So, there you have it. I didn’t touch much on who had what ideas about what they would do if they were elected,
because truthfully, I don’t really believe them anyway when they say it. I did point out my feelings on a few issues,
but nothing spectacular.

The more I think about it, the more I am thinking a Mickey Mouse and Bart Simpson ticket would be interesting too.
Hmmmmmmmm…

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